Rude Mechs

WHO WE ARE
Rude Mechs is an ensemble-based theatre collective from Austin, TX with a full company of 28 members led by six Co-Producing Artistic Directors. Since 1995, Rude Mechs has created a genre-defying slate of original works that we produce at home in Texas and tour nationally and abroad. In Austin, we manage The Off Center, a performance venue for arts groups of every discipline. Touring and Off-Broadway productions include The Method Gun, Dionysus in 69, Get Your War On, How Late It Was, How Late, Cherrywood, and Lipstick Traces, and our most recent productions Now Now Oh Now and Fixing King John. We are deeply proud to represent Texas as a home for cutting-edge theatre - even when we get asinine headlines like "Texas Troupe Does Play!"

HOW WE WORK
Our creation and development process shifts from production to production. for Stop Hitting Yourself, the Co-Producing Artistic Directors met a few times per week for about 6 weeks in fall 2012. We were thinking about altruism and ended up really focusing on Ayn Rand, especially her novel Anthem and an on-line lexicon of her ideas. We held two company lab days to hatch ideas around the themes of charity and money and personal extravagances. We introduced ourselves to the world of tap dance with YouTube videos (and later with the fabulous Danny Herman). We mounted a full workshop production in April 2013 at The Off Center. Then another smaller workshop in September of 2013. We ate a lot of queso. We did a lot of talking with our audience in Austin. We cut scenes, added scenes, reinserted scenes. Tap danced. Ate more queso. Started over.

For more about us, visit our website.